This Week I Learned: 2022W28

Postgres

• Thanks to this article I learned that Postgres (and major other SQL DBs) treat null values as distinct when adding a Unique constraint.
• Postgres doesn’t support ULID natively yet. There are some experimental extensions to do so, but not official ones. More details here.

PDF Generation

• If you don’t manage to do what you want when generating a PDF with puppeteer or wkhtmltopdf, and don’t want to buy a super expensive license of Prince, you can try to generate it through the SASS service DocRaptor. The tests (with a big watermark) are free unlimited, but a free acount gives you 5 documents generated for free without watemark. Great service and customer service, and the premium version is not so expensive if you don’t need to generate documents on a daily basis.

PHP

• This PHP library, T-Regx wraps native PHP regex functions in a nice API, close to what you could get with Python. Interesting.

CSS/Tailwind

• In CSS, utility classes are really not the same as inline styles. I read this very interesting article defending utility classes (tools like TailwindCSS). Tailwind always sounded super weird and counter-intuitive to me (without even trying). This makes me want to try it.

React / Markdown

• You can use Markdown in your JSX files through MDX.